Night of the Assassin: Assassin Series Prequel by Russell Blake (latest ebook reader .txt) 📕

Raul considered arguing the point and then decided that he didn’t care that much. He’d still get to shoot a couple of bad guys, at least, and what did he care in the end if half the squad got mowed down?

“Yes, sir. Thank you for hearing me out, sir. If we’re going to do a frontal, could I please get a magazine of armor piercing rounds? They’ll come in handy to take out the sentry inside the bridge,” Raul requested.

The commander nodded and called on the com to one of the team members waiting in the next building.

“Twenty minutes. You’ll have ‘em. We’ll move in thirty.”

The commander spun around and began issuing orders in preparation for a brute force assault. They’d need a couple of armored personnel carriers – enough to carry forty men. He ordered up two Unimog armored trucks and two BTR-70 armored carriers; eight-wheeled vehicles that could accommodate seven commandos each, along with a three man crew to operate the turret-mounted 14.5 mm heavy machine-gun and smaller 7.62 mm machine-gun. The fallback plan was much more straightforward. Drive up to the ship. Deploy men if no firing took place and seize the ship. If the sentries or crew decided to shoot it out, blast away at everything in site and shoot their way through the ship until the crew either surrendered, or was dead. It was inelegant and would result in a lot of bullets flying but it had the benefit of simplicity.

Twenty-five minutes later, a young commando approached Raul and handed him a magazine with five rounds of armor piercing .50 caliber bullets, apologizing that they couldn’t find any more at such short notice. Raul thanked him, and emptied half of one of the spare magazines, counting out five shells and replacing them with the five armor piercing rounds. He ejected the current round in the rifle and chambered one of the new armor piercing cartridges, then returned to watching the sentries through his scope.

The commander checked his watch, and at precisely three-forty a.m. ordered the assault, after which everything happened quickly. The two gray BTR-70s, which resembled small tanks more than anything else, rumbled around the corner and out onto the pier, followed by the two hulking trucks. The two sentries on the dock stared in disbelief at the apparition and then hurriedly scuttled up the gangplank and disappeared up into the ship. One man’s head reappeared and then the gangplank collapsed onto the concrete pier below. The steel watertight door slammed shut with a boom. As it was barred from within, the grinding of the cogs was audible halfway down the dock, even over the growl of the vehicles.

It was going to be considerably harder to take the freighter because the traffickers were forewarned. The easy access to the ship from the gangplank was gone and the commandos on the dock would be in a siege situation against a ship whose hull rose easily four stories above the pier, with no obvious entry point available. The commander watched all this in a kind of frozen frustration, and then the shooting started; men emerged from the interior of the ship, moved to the edge of the hull and began firing from behind the protection of the steel from which the hardy old boat was built.

Raul took in the situation for a few moments, and squeezed the trigger. The gun’s boom was deafening. Ears ringing, he watched with satisfaction as both the sentry standing outside the bridge and the man inside collapsed. He’d timed it so that he fired when the outside man was directly in front of the man in the bridge, effectively killing two birds with one armor-piercing stone. No reason to waste his precious ammo, after all.

He swiveled his attention to the hull, where he could just make out heads popping up here and there, like on a fairground shooting stall. A man leaned over and fired his weapon at the vehicles below. Raul caressed the trigger again and watched as the man’s head vaporized. Moving down the line, he took out another. He was now four down with three shells, which he felt was a fair contribution to the ensuing train wreck of an operation. Raul peered through the scope, trying to find any other obvious targets, but the men along the side of the ship had figured out there was a sniper at work, and had retreated into the ship, barring the watertight ship’s deck entry door in the process.

The gun turrets on the BTR-70s opened up with their armor piercing rounds, but quickly discovered that their shells, which could easily penetrate up to a one and a half inch steel plate, were just denting the heavy hull, which had been fashioned from considerably thicker material. That left the commandos and the traffickers in a classic Mexican standoff. Shooting from the ship had stopped other than from a lone gunman who hadn’t made it inside in time, but was behind the bulk of the bridge’s tower and so out of Raul’s line of sight. Firing from the two BTR-70s had also stopped, though the entire waterfront area still resonated with receding echoes of gunfire.

The commander barked orders into the radio and the men emptied from the personnel carriers and took up position to mount an assault on the ship. The men below flung three grappling hooks affixed to black nylon rope over the hull’s edge. The four-pronged hooks all found a purchase. The problem was that any men on the ropes who got caught in the fire from the remaining gunman were dead meat, so nobody wanted to be the first to climb four stories up onto the deck. Raul decided to shift his position and moved down the row of windows on the warehouse until he was more symmetrically placed and could see down the entire length of the ship.

He set his rifle tripod down, and resumed peering through the scope. There,